Why not attack teachers? It is a lot easier than putting the blame on the parents-who refuse to take an equal responsibility for what’s wrong with American society.
Which is why the quote from John Cole’s place rings very true:
The New York Times is having a hard time figuring out why the right wing is making teachers scapegoats. I’m sure ED has a nuanced take on this at his new blog, but I’ll blunder in and take a crack at it.
If you have a political movement that energizes some of the most ignorant members of society by telling them tall tales,(emphasis mine) I’m just going to guess that those ignoramuses don’t know enough to give a shit about the quality of teachers. And, if they’re anything like the snowbilly grifter they worship, they also resent the teachers in their past who tried to tell them they’re wrong.
Add into the mix a group of elites who will educate their children at private schools or “centers of excellence” in their walled burboclaves, and you’ve got a movement that’s more than happy to throw teachers under the bus. The majority of them can’t appreciate a good education, and the rest of them don’t expect the public school system to provide one to their children.
Are there reforms that need to made in our educational system? Of course there are. But don’t kid yourself-all of the patch work solutions like charter schools, making teachers the scapegoat ignore some fundamental truth-namely that the flaws in the classrooms are a reflection of the even bigger flaws in American society as a whole.
Most education researchers, though, recognize that Rhee’s simple vision of heroic teachers saving American education is a fantasy, and that her dramatic, often authoritarian, style is ill-suited for education. If the ability to fire bad teachers and pay great teachers more were the key missing ingredient in education reform, why haven’t charter schools, 88% of which are nonunionized and have that flexibility, lit the education world on fire? Why did the nation’s most comprehensive study of charter schools, conducted by Stanford University researchers and sponsored by pro-charter foundations, conclude that charters outperformed regular public schools only 17 percent of the time, and actually did significantly worse 37 percent of the time? Why don’t Southern states, which have weak teachers’ unions, or none at all, outperform other parts of the country? Rhee often noted that poor blacks in New York are two years ahead of poor blacks in Washington, which properly illustrates that demography is not destiny, but New York didn’t get ahead by firing bad teachers. Chancellor Joel Klein terminated only three teachers for incompetence between 2008 and 2010.
The unions are not the villians here-except in the sense that they had a need to exist to try to do a variety of things to raise awareness about the need to pay teachers well. Both the NEA and the AFT has endorsed plans to get rid of poor performing teachers. But the stereotype that all union teachers are bad is just wrong. Working with the union and collobrating with them-not confronting them has a track record that has proven effective.
But I guess rich GOP governors of cheese producing states don’t have time to research that.